Now you can prevent your kids from watching porn by telling them, without lying, that porn can make them blind.

A new research conducted by Vanderbilt University psychologist David Zald and Yale University researchers Steven Most, Marvin Chun and David Widders proves that people shown erotic or gory images frequently fail to process what they see immediately afterwards.

"We observed that people fail to detect visual images that appeared one-fifth of a second after emotional images, whereas they can detect those images with little problem after neutral images," Zald, assistant professor of psychology and member of the Vanderbilt Kennedy Center for Research on Human Development, said.

Anyone who has ever slowed down to look at an accident as they are driving by, or has been stuck behind someone who has, is familiar with the "rubbernecking" effect.

Zald and his colleagues set out to determine if the rubbernecking effect carries over into more minute lapses of attention through two separate experiments.

In the first experiment, research subjects were shown hundreds of pictures that included a mix of disturbing images along with landscape or architectural photos. They were told to search the images for a particular target image. An irrelevant, emotionally negative or neutral picture preceded the target by two to eight items. The closer the negative pictures were to the target image, the more frequently the subject failed to spot the target. In a subsequent study, which has not yet been published, the researchers substituted erotic for negative images and found the same basic effect.

In the second experiment, the researchers sought to determine if individuals can override their emotion-induced blindness by focusing more deliberately on the target for which they are searching. In this experiment, the subjects undertook two different trials. In one they were told specifically to look for a rotated photo of a building; in the other they were told to look for a rotated photo of either a building or a landscape.

After running the tests, the researchers discovered that they were partially right: specific instructions helped some subjects control their attention, but it didn't help others.

"We think that there is essentially a bottleneck for information processing and if a certain type of stimulus captures attention, it can basically jam up that bottleneck so subsequent information can't get through," Zald said. "It appears to happen involuntarily."

"We increasingly are suspicious that people who are more neurotic or harm avoidant may not be detecting negative stimuli more than other people, but they have a greater difficulty suppressing that information," Zald added.

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